A semi-professional blog about programming

Visual Studio Tools & Extensions

I think most .NET developers (or anyone using Visual Studio for any length of time) have a running list of extensions and tools that make life a bit easier. The list varies depending on your role, of course. If you’re strictly a desktop developer, probably you don’t immediately install any Web Essentials extensions, for example.

Of course, many of us wear many hats and aren’t strictly working in one environment or another, so the list of extensions/plugins/tools we fall back on can become fairly lengthy. I wanted to share my current list in the hope that someone may find it useful at some point, and that possibly someone else may offer feedback regarding a better tool or known issues or anything else that comes to mind.

As of this writing (September 7, 2018), I’m using Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.8.3). I work with WPF, WCF, REST, some MVC, some Angular, a lot of SQL and LINQ, and a metric ton of “okay, why did this break/what did I do wrong here”, for context. I also don’t mind paying for tools if I think they’ll help (and I’ve paid for tools that have not been helpful, too, so there’s that). I’ll split out the list in FREE and PAID categories.

Note that you can grab your own list of installed extensions a few different ways, but this way might be easiest (works in VS 2017, too):

Common Azure Tools version 1.10
Provides common services for use by Azure Mobile Services and Microsoft Azure Tools.

CustomizeVSWindowTitle 3 version 1.0
Lets you customize, to an extent, what’s displayed in the IDE window title — especially useful for if you’re likely to have more than one instance of Visual Studio open at a time

File Icons version 2.7
Adds icons for files that are not recognized by Solution Explorer

ProjectColoredFrame version 1.0
Helps you to differentiate between editing documents belonging to different projects by adding a faintly colored border.

ProjectConfigurationManager version 1.7.1099.0
A Visual Studio extension to ease management of solution and project configurations.

SlowCheetah – XML config transforms version 1.0
This package enables you to transform your app.config or any other XML file based on the build configuration. It also adds additional tooling to help you create XML transforms.